The group, which also owns the Mini and Rolls-Royce brands, sold a record 450,608 vehicles over the three-month period, an annualised gain of 18.5 percent.

For the first six months of the year, sales jumped 19.7 percent to 833,366.
BMW issued a new full-year target in July of more than 1.6 million sales.

“The first half of 2011 has been the best six-month period in the BMW group’s history,” Reithofer noted in the statement.

BMW dealers have been delivering more cars worldwide, but especially in China and the rest of Asia, the industry’s global growth engine.

China now represents almost 15 percent of the group’s total sales, a level close to that of Germany itself.

“We are looking more and more in the direction of the BRIC countries,” Reithofer commented in reference to Brazil, Russia, India and China.

German rivals Daimler, which owns Mercedes, and Volkswagen, which owns Audi, published solid quarterly results last week as well and raised their annual forecasts despite concern over debt problems in Europe and the United States.

Reithofer said sales had even been held back by production bottlenecks, saying the company was working at 102 percent of capacity and that it might also make a substantial investment in its US plant.

The BMW statement noted that sales and earnings growth would also “be held down during the second half of the year” by changes to some popular models and costs stemming from the launch of others.

BMW finance director Friedrich Eichiner put the total amount of those charges at around 500 million euros.

Sanford Bernstein analyst Warburton nonetheless described profitability at BMW as “stunning” and added: “We think that only Porsche and Ferrari can claim to have ever met or exceeded this level of profitability in the global auto industry.”